I had salmon on my mind when I decided to move to Alaska 20 years ago. My boyfriend at the time, who was trying to convince me to migrate north with him, grilled up delicious fillets of wild Alaskan sockeye for me. That deep red flesh lured me out of vegetarianism and to higher latitudes; a month after he packed the back of his old Volvo station wagon and hit the Alaska Highway, I stuffed a backpack and two duffels, hopped on a ferry and headed north to join him. When I arrived in a little community called Ketchikan, pink salmon thronged a creek that ran right through the middle of town. A thousand dorsal fins wriggled out of the water as the fish pressed upstream. I was hooked.
Though that boyfriend and I split, I’ve stayed north ever since. Now, I live in Homer, a small coastal town on a salmon-filled bay, with my husband and two daughters. Since moving here my life has revolved around these fish. I grew up along the tepid, tea-coloured creeks of Maryland that held minnows and crayfish and as a kid I had dropped small hooks into lakes in search of a sunfish or two, but soon after I arrived in Alaska I began fishing for salmon with a salvaged scrap of net in the bay that landed nearly a winter’s worth. Pulling gleaming fish from these murky waters that first time felt magical – and still does. Few things so wondrous in life are as free.
Today, my family and I bend the fleeting summer months – salmon season – around the opportunities to catch enough of them to fill our freezer, timing skiff trips across the bay to coincide with a run of sockeye up a rushing creek, or with the days when the snagging is good in a tidal lagoon nearby. The rest of the year, we pull fillets out of our large, second freezer or pluck jars of canned salmon off the shelf, and eat this fish dozens of different ways – grilled, baked, stir-fried, pickled, smoked, raw, and made into burgers, salad and soup.
I live in a place that’s wedded to salmon. Hundreds of local people in this town of 5,000 are commercial salmon fishermen, scores more fish for themselves or work in an industry tied to salmon. So it makes sense that the local calendar runs on these fish. Schools break up in late May so families can prepare for the salmon season. The ebb and flow of boats from the harbour and local boatyards follow salmon. Tourists do too, thronging into town just as the fish start filling local rivers.
It might be odd that Homer calls itself the “Halibut Fishing Capital of the World” when it’s salmon that truly captures locals’ hearts. Halibut are dun-coloured flatfish; we think of them as meat that swims. Their firm, white flesh is a mild and adaptable ingredient that makes for a good break from salmon. But no one feels a special kinship with halibut. No one gets tattoos of them, either. Go to an end-of-summer potluck here, and not only will you get to enjoy salmon on the grill (and prepared in a dozen other ways), you’ll be served an ample helping of salmon body art as well.
I love that my daughters – aged seven and ten – are growing up in this salmon world. My ten-year-old’s fourth-grade teacher is a commercial salmon fisherman and over the years two of my kids’ favourite babysitters have been commercial fishermen too: kind, strong young women who grew up helping out in their family’s fishing businesses. Maggie is now the captain of her own boat. Isabel, a whiz at running skiffs and picking fish from nets, has recently left the state for college but will, no doubt, come back for salmon season.
My own social world is a web of relationships that have something to do with salmon: Kara, my die-hard salmon-fishing partner, was also at the births of my two children; some days, I’m not sure which experience has been more foundational for our friendship. There’s Rebecca, who is frozen in my mind standing on her paddleboard in a wetsuit, holding up a huge silver salmon she had just hooked while our kids played together in the bay. Christine came up to Alaska to commercial fish and now is a nurse. Jason built a salmon smokehouse last summer in his yard. Meghan is raising her kids on the back deck of her commercial salmon gillnetter.
Salmon play a role in my marriage too. Each summer, when it’s time to smoke and can salmon, my husband and I reminisce about the first batch of fish we put up together, the one before we were married and long before kids, when we were living in a sunny, second-story apartment at the beach. That salmon, we remind each other, was the most beautiful fish we ever prepared. We had cut the fillets into tidy strips, brined and rinsed them before laying the fish on racks on the deck, where an ideal combination of sun and wind made them glisten like bars of ruby and gave them a perfect pellicle, the tacky skin that must form on the fish to seal in moisture before you smoke it. We’ve never managed a pellicle like that since. When we talk about that salmon, we’re speaking in code about the passing of beauty and time, about the ways we long for those carefree days at the beach. (...)
In Alaska, we pride ourselves on having a different salmon story. Alaska has more miles of coastline than all of the other states combined and the bulk of our coastal waters are salmon habitat. We think of our state as a place built on salmon. Native peoples have been eating salmon for more than 11,000 years, in many cases living lives that centred on these fish, catching them by net, spear, trap, dart, hook and weir; eating them year-round fresh, dried, smoked and fermented; and making the skin into boots and parkas.
For more than 150 years, people have come from all over the world for Alaska’s salmon. Canneries cropped up along the state’s coastlines as early as 1878, with segregated housing for Italian, Chinese, Scandinavian and, later, Filipino workers. It’s because of these fish that Alaska is one of the United States. When a David and Goliath battle broke out between local salmon fishermen and the Seattle-based companies that had blocked off the rivers with fish traps, local residents fought back, demanding local control and pressing for statehood, which was granted in 1959.
Since then, lack of development – we have only about one person per square mile here – and careful management of fisheries, have kept Alaska’s salmon runs viable, maintaining an industry worth billions of dollars that employs some 30,000 people per year. In Southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay, you’ll find the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery where last year more than 56m red salmon returned, a run more than 100 times that of all the wild salmon returning to Norway. (...)
Our state is a jumble of hippies, soldiers, recluses, artists and oil men, but salmon is something we all agree on. We want them in our lives – in our nets, on our lines, in our rivers and on our dinner plates. And more – we want to be able to catch them with our kids. In many ways, salmon define who we are as Alaskans – bolstering the cherished image we have of ourselves as tough, self-reliant people living at the edge of the wilderness. And in a world that is increasingly polarised, salmon remind us to embrace anything that brings us together.
by Miranda Weiss, The Economist 1843 | Read more:
Though that boyfriend and I split, I’ve stayed north ever since. Now, I live in Homer, a small coastal town on a salmon-filled bay, with my husband and two daughters. Since moving here my life has revolved around these fish. I grew up along the tepid, tea-coloured creeks of Maryland that held minnows and crayfish and as a kid I had dropped small hooks into lakes in search of a sunfish or two, but soon after I arrived in Alaska I began fishing for salmon with a salvaged scrap of net in the bay that landed nearly a winter’s worth. Pulling gleaming fish from these murky waters that first time felt magical – and still does. Few things so wondrous in life are as free.
Today, my family and I bend the fleeting summer months – salmon season – around the opportunities to catch enough of them to fill our freezer, timing skiff trips across the bay to coincide with a run of sockeye up a rushing creek, or with the days when the snagging is good in a tidal lagoon nearby. The rest of the year, we pull fillets out of our large, second freezer or pluck jars of canned salmon off the shelf, and eat this fish dozens of different ways – grilled, baked, stir-fried, pickled, smoked, raw, and made into burgers, salad and soup. I live in a place that’s wedded to salmon. Hundreds of local people in this town of 5,000 are commercial salmon fishermen, scores more fish for themselves or work in an industry tied to salmon. So it makes sense that the local calendar runs on these fish. Schools break up in late May so families can prepare for the salmon season. The ebb and flow of boats from the harbour and local boatyards follow salmon. Tourists do too, thronging into town just as the fish start filling local rivers.
It might be odd that Homer calls itself the “Halibut Fishing Capital of the World” when it’s salmon that truly captures locals’ hearts. Halibut are dun-coloured flatfish; we think of them as meat that swims. Their firm, white flesh is a mild and adaptable ingredient that makes for a good break from salmon. But no one feels a special kinship with halibut. No one gets tattoos of them, either. Go to an end-of-summer potluck here, and not only will you get to enjoy salmon on the grill (and prepared in a dozen other ways), you’ll be served an ample helping of salmon body art as well.
I love that my daughters – aged seven and ten – are growing up in this salmon world. My ten-year-old’s fourth-grade teacher is a commercial salmon fisherman and over the years two of my kids’ favourite babysitters have been commercial fishermen too: kind, strong young women who grew up helping out in their family’s fishing businesses. Maggie is now the captain of her own boat. Isabel, a whiz at running skiffs and picking fish from nets, has recently left the state for college but will, no doubt, come back for salmon season.
My own social world is a web of relationships that have something to do with salmon: Kara, my die-hard salmon-fishing partner, was also at the births of my two children; some days, I’m not sure which experience has been more foundational for our friendship. There’s Rebecca, who is frozen in my mind standing on her paddleboard in a wetsuit, holding up a huge silver salmon she had just hooked while our kids played together in the bay. Christine came up to Alaska to commercial fish and now is a nurse. Jason built a salmon smokehouse last summer in his yard. Meghan is raising her kids on the back deck of her commercial salmon gillnetter.
Salmon play a role in my marriage too. Each summer, when it’s time to smoke and can salmon, my husband and I reminisce about the first batch of fish we put up together, the one before we were married and long before kids, when we were living in a sunny, second-story apartment at the beach. That salmon, we remind each other, was the most beautiful fish we ever prepared. We had cut the fillets into tidy strips, brined and rinsed them before laying the fish on racks on the deck, where an ideal combination of sun and wind made them glisten like bars of ruby and gave them a perfect pellicle, the tacky skin that must form on the fish to seal in moisture before you smoke it. We’ve never managed a pellicle like that since. When we talk about that salmon, we’re speaking in code about the passing of beauty and time, about the ways we long for those carefree days at the beach. (...)
In Alaska, we pride ourselves on having a different salmon story. Alaska has more miles of coastline than all of the other states combined and the bulk of our coastal waters are salmon habitat. We think of our state as a place built on salmon. Native peoples have been eating salmon for more than 11,000 years, in many cases living lives that centred on these fish, catching them by net, spear, trap, dart, hook and weir; eating them year-round fresh, dried, smoked and fermented; and making the skin into boots and parkas.
For more than 150 years, people have come from all over the world for Alaska’s salmon. Canneries cropped up along the state’s coastlines as early as 1878, with segregated housing for Italian, Chinese, Scandinavian and, later, Filipino workers. It’s because of these fish that Alaska is one of the United States. When a David and Goliath battle broke out between local salmon fishermen and the Seattle-based companies that had blocked off the rivers with fish traps, local residents fought back, demanding local control and pressing for statehood, which was granted in 1959.
Since then, lack of development – we have only about one person per square mile here – and careful management of fisheries, have kept Alaska’s salmon runs viable, maintaining an industry worth billions of dollars that employs some 30,000 people per year. In Southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay, you’ll find the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery where last year more than 56m red salmon returned, a run more than 100 times that of all the wild salmon returning to Norway. (...)
Our state is a jumble of hippies, soldiers, recluses, artists and oil men, but salmon is something we all agree on. We want them in our lives – in our nets, on our lines, in our rivers and on our dinner plates. And more – we want to be able to catch them with our kids. In many ways, salmon define who we are as Alaskans – bolstering the cherished image we have of ourselves as tough, self-reliant people living at the edge of the wilderness. And in a world that is increasingly polarised, salmon remind us to embrace anything that brings us together.
by Miranda Weiss, The Economist 1843 | Read more:
Image: Ian Willms
